The Law Enforcement Family: Balancing Work And Home Life, Part 2

00:04
Brent
Between the lines with Virtual Academy. We all have a story to tell. Hello, and welcome to another edition of between the Lines with Virtual Academy. I’m your co host And Henson, and today we’re kind of continuing a conversation that we initially started last week with guests Catherine Boyle and her father, Michael Boyle, who retired as a lieutenant from the Philadelphia Police Department after 30 years of service. We kind of wanted to dedicate a few episodes where we examine the dichotomy of serving the community as a whole, as a member of law enforcement, while also prioritizing and balancing life outside of work. A lot of times you don’t hear from those who are at home anxiously waiting for their loved ones to return or even sacrificing things in their own life because they know that mom, dad, husband, wife are off working for the greater good.

01:05
Brent
So we wanted to get a little bit more perspective on the topic and I think it’s just a guess here. I think our host may have signed up for more than he bargained for today because we have not one, but two members of the Warren clan with us to dish the dirts before we bring them in. Oh, it’s going to be a good one. I can feel it. Let’s bring in our host, Mr. Michael Warren. First off, Mike, what are you thinking? You got some loaded ammo know, obviously.

01:33
Michael Warren
This is a bad sign about my decision making ability. Just throwing that out. You know, in all seriousness, the conversation we had with Catherine in particular and Michael was great. But Catherine, when she talked about how insulated she was from what her dad did and what a great job he did, it actually set me along the path of self reflection on I probably didn’t do a good job as he did. Just worked out that my mom is up visiting from Georgia. My daughter who’s a preschool teacher, she has this particular day of the week. So it’s just bad decision making and opportunity came together and here we are.

02:18
Brent
Well, and I don’t want it to say that we’re just highlighting those in law enforcement. This could happen to anyone. Whatever career they take on, they get just ingrained in what they’re doing and then they focus one area of their life and then sometimes maybe their family life takes a hit. But it sounds like in our conversation with Catherine, Michael, he found a way to bring in that balance and it sounds like it came with age. He started his career in his early thirty s. And so he kind of had that mindset, that wisdom that comes along with getting older, of knowing how to balance things.

02:53
Michael Warren
And I think also maybe his educational background played into it a little bit because he had the background in psychology and perhaps he had a wiser view, but also a more grounded view in the negative impact that he could have while doing a good thing. And I think it did serve him it’s obviously served him very well because they were fantastic people to talk to.

03:19
Brent
Now, I only know Mike Warren from the past five years, and to me, you’re a lovable, down to earth guy. I don’t know what 21 year old Mike was. So just a primer here. What’s the difference between Mike now and Mike when he first started out?

03:33
Michael Warren
Besides topical hair. Okay, but besides that right there, I like to think that I recognize how quickly time goes and how important those moments are in our lives. What’s the old saying that the days are long but the years are short? And it’s a bit of a platitude, but, man, it really applies. And it applies not just to our career, but also to our family life. I mean, you’re experiencing it right now.

04:04
Brent
Clock ticking with my boy. Yeah.

04:06
Michael Warren
And so I’m going to go and throw this out there. I’m not going to look at him when I say this, but Brent and I, while we have our differences, we also share a common trait, and that common trait is that we’re criers. Especially we start talking about family. You’re going to have to pull me together at some point, saying, you know.

04:24
Brent
When I talk about my family, especially my son, it’s something I can’t stop. But I just get overwhelmed with emotion for some reason, and maybe that’s through time, through experience, I don’t know. But you recognize that time is short and you try to get all those.

04:41
Michael Warren
Moments in, it’s really important. And unfortunately, what do they say? It’s not what we do that we often regret later in life. It’s what we didn’t do that hindsight 2020. Quite honestly, it haunts me. And so I was kind of pissed at Michael that he seemed to do such a better job at this in our conversation, I think that these two ladies are going to bring some unique perspectives and quite honestly, being very vulnerable. I think that you’re going to hear where someone who didn’t do quite as good a job as Michael did because they were fantastic. Me? Not always.

05:27
Brent
Well, you don’t know what you don’t know when you’re going through things. Certainly I’ve made my fair share of mistakes, but you know what I’ve learned from them that’s made me a better person. And I would think that’s probably the same thing for a lot of people. And that’s how you get better. That’s what we’re doing here now is we want people to listen to these podcasts and think, well, maybe that’s how I am. That’s how I’m acting around my family. How can I get better and how can I maintain that work life balance. I think that’s the important part of.

05:55
Michael Warren
This know, I look at these episodes kind of like the ones we did with Joe Willis, where we start talking about mental health. Hopefully one of our listeners, they hear it and they say, oh, so I’m not the only one that feels that way. And perhaps that’s what they’ll get out of these episodes here to say, oh, man. So I’m not the only one that struggles or I’m not the only one that sometimes feels like a failure. And you said it perfectly. Again, learning from our mistakes, expecting the mistake. Free life is something we’re never going to achieve, but we can achieve not continuing to make the same mistakes.

06:31
Brent
Yeah, I’m going to flip the script on you just a little bit right now, because usually you say, let’s go ahead and bring in our guests. Tell us a little bit about them. Well, since I didn’t get detailed BIOS on your mom and your daughter and they’re sitting right beside you, I’m going to flip the script and say, why don’t you tell us a little bit about our guests today, Mike?

06:48
Michael Warren
All right. So with me today, first of all, I have the first lady in my life, and that’s my mom, Sarah Green. Listen, I was the first in a lot of things in the family, okay. On that side of the family, I was the first grandchild, I was my parents first child. Susan, when you listen to this, understand I’m still a favorite. But Sarah, I think she brings a really unique perspective to things because not only does she have a son that’s a police officer, but she has a dad and an uncle and another uncle. At one point, she had a nephew all in law enforcement. I’m interested because we’ve talked a little bit about it, but I want to know what that stress is like and how it’s different from the perspective of a child versus one that has a child.

07:43
Brent
Right.

07:43
Michael Warren
I think that would be unique. So Sarah Green is my mom. She’s here with us. I also have my daughter, and thankfully, she’s my only daughter. I have four kids, but she’s the only daughter.

07:54
Brent
Where does she fall in line?

07:56
Michael Warren
She’s my second kid. You know, I’m going to say this and it’ll make Thomas mad, but that’s okay. My daughter Laura. Warren Harmon. Okay. Because she got married, Laura, literally her entire life. I was a police officer. She was actually born when I was in the police academy. And so she’s known nothing different. She will probably be the one that will be able to tell you where I failed. But she’s a preschool teacher now. She’s doing fantastic work with kids. And you and I both believe that we’re going to change society for the better. That’s where we have to make the change. And so she’s working towards that. So Laura Harmon is here with us today.

08:39
Brent
Can I start I want to talk with your mom extensively. I want to start with Laura really quickly, because when I first became a didn’t again, I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and so I was much more stern. I was harsh. You got to do it this way, and this way. And at some point, I softened, and I backed off, and I thought, you know what? Having a child is an amazing thing, and I want to enjoy that time. Did you see your dad soften over the years, or did he stay the same or what was that like for you?

09:14
Laura Harmon
Well, he definitely softened, probably. When I was in high school, I would say, is when he started to soften.

09:20
Brent
And what types of things did you when you say he softened, what could you see in him that changed a little bit?

09:27
Laura Harmon
Well, when I was growing up, it was always this way. This is the right way. And when I got older, it was more like, okay, you can try it this way. It’s not the way I would have done it, but you can try it that way, and always supported me doing that.

09:41
Michael Warren
Now, Brent, I got to throw something in here because my mom had a tremendous influence on that, and I often talk about this in classes that I teach that as my mom has gotten older, she has become more retrospective in her thinking. And she often tells me that one of the things that she regrets most about the way that she raised my sister and I was that she gave us the straight, narrow line to walk. And she said, what I should have done was to give you two lines and told you to stay between it because you and your sister are different people.

10:15
Brent
See what you did there? Between the lines?

10:17
Michael Warren
Yeah. And if you’re not a subscriber, please make sure you click on the subscribe button to between the Lines podcast. My sister and I are different people. We’re going to be at different points on the spectrum, but as long as we’re in there, when she said that, I was like, oh, man, I got to change that, because I was doing the same straight and narrow, and it took a while, but it did end up benefiting Michael and Laura, my two oldest kids.

10:43
Brent
Well, we mimic what we come into contact with, so if our parents act a certain way, ODS, are we’re going to mimic some of that behavior? If I can just pivot to you, Sarah. Mom feels so weird calling you Sarah, so I want to okay, if I can pivot to you with your father was in law enforcement, your son, your husband, correct? All of them?

11:07
Michael Warren
No, not her husband. Just dad, two uncles, a nephew, and her son.

11:12
Brent
So that’s a life that you were really encased in for quite a few years. How was it like being insulated in that world? How do you try to navigate it not being involved in the police community and just kind of separating the two.

11:28
Sara Green
It can be easy and it can be hard. As the daughter of a police officer, people, especially boys, looked at you differently, believe me, in a good way or.

11:40
Brent
A bad way, because I wouldn’t want to mess with a police officer’s daughter.

11:43
Sara Green
That’s right. See?

11:44
Brent
Okay.

11:45
Sara Green
I wanted to say one thing, though. Growing up as the child of police officer can be hard because as a younger child, we finally got to an age where we understood what was going on out there at night when he was working, and that made it really hard. The worst time I can remember was a prison break. And they had a lot of them loose out there, and my dad was out there looking for them, and it scared us, but we didn’t want to scare our mom. So the kids as kids, we slept with screwdrivers and hammers under our pillow, thinking we could protect her if they came to our house.

12:27
Brent
Wow.

12:28
Michael Warren
And that right there, I think, is important to point out dad Pop was what we call my Grandpa Pop is out protecting society. And yet the kids at home felt unprotected. It probably wasn’t as extreme as sleeping with a screwdriver. But you can see you have to choose one master. Man can only serve one master. And trying to fix it, I think, is difficult.

12:54
Brent
And I think that would probably, and I don’t know, different generations take on things differently. But if it were me, that would really start to play with my head a little bit where I would say, what am I doing here? I’m out protecting society, the community as a whole, but I’m not able to protect my family. That would start to play tricks on me.

13:13
Sara Green
But, you know, in a way, it’s not that bad, though, because I thought it was pretty good that were enough to stand up and protect our mother, though.

13:23
Michael Warren
Now, Mom, I got to throw this at you because Mama, my mom’s mom was a school teacher. I would say that was almost a double whammy for you because you can’t get away with nothing out on the street because Pops out there, and you can’t get away with nothing at school because Mama’s there, too. And so it’s got to be, what, like a paranoid person? I feel like somebody’s watching me. Guess what they were.

13:50
Sara Green
Well, as a teenager, you knew they were. And like you said, though, a boy thinks twice before he asks a girl out whose father is out on the.

13:59
Brent
Road watching, that’ll dovetail nicely into asking Laura some questions. So what types of things did you run into with Big Mike? Because I gotta say, if I find out that Mike Warren is your dad, I think that teddy bear of a guy bring him on over to the house. But maybe that wasn’t the case for you. So was it difficult growing up trying to navigate as you’re getting older, going out and trying to socialize?

14:29
Laura Harmon
Well, I always started off when I talked about my dad, I was like, yeah, he’s a police officer, just to give them a fair warning. But I think with all my friends and anybody that I dated, he was always welcoming to a point.

14:45
Michael Warren
Then I’m a much better actor than I give myself credit for. I probably should be on strike right now with the SAG people. You know what, though? When I thought about my mom, okay, my mom has two brothers, an older brother and a younger brother. And from my perspective, that would have been more intimidating than what Laura’s boyfriends would have been by me. But that’s from my perspective. You know what?

15:14
Brent
If I if I have a police officer dad and I’m going up to the door because I took the head football coach’s daughter to homecoming one time, that was the scariest thing, walking up to that door, putting a corsage on. So I can’t imagine walking up to a policeman’s daughter’s house. So that would got to be a little intimidating.

15:35
Michael Warren
Well, I have to throw this out there, okay? Because Laura not only has a dad who’s a police officer, but her stepmom is also a police officer and still a current police officer. And so I would like to ask Laura, how was that different dad versus stepmom as the police officer?

15:54
Laura Harmon
She let me go on a lot more ride alongs than you did.

15:58
Michael Warren
That’s because I didn’t like the screaming in the passenger seat.

16:02
Laura Harmon
I did not scream.

16:06
Michael Warren
I will take that a step further. Now, Laura’s a bit of a drama queen, I believe I told you folks about. How she know? She let me know that she was going to see Taylor Swift. She called me.

16:20
Brent
I mean, I would have had the same reaction.

16:25
Michael Warren
Same reaction as boy bands, too, right? I mean, going exactly. But when I look at my grandpa, he has always been a bigger than life figure to me. And so I can’t imagine being in the same class that he was as far as intimidation when it came to that aspect right there. One of my biggest regrets, Brent, is that my grandpa passed away before I became a police officer. And oftentimes throughout my career, I would think, man, I wonder what Pop would be thinking about, right?

16:59
Sara Green
And he would have been so proud.

17:01
Michael Warren
He was such a good dude. But I do have to ask this mom, I want you to describe for our listeners what it was like for dad when he met Uncle Earl. Uncle Earl Hamrick was the sheriff I was telling you folks about in Twigg County, Georgia. What was that experience like?

17:22
Sara Green
We were sitting on a bar stool in a barbecue place that my other uncle ran, and the uncle that was a sheriff walked in and the first thing he did was grab Don by the shoulder and had him on his knees on the floor.

17:40
Michael Warren
It was like a Balkan death grip. Yes.

17:42
Sara Green
And he was scared to fight back. But even my husband, 50 years ago, 60 years ago, were dating in high school and he would tell you right quick, it made a lot of difference because he knew my dad, he respected my dad and he wasn’t going to deal with him as a cop.

18:04
Michael Warren
I want to ask both of you this, so we’re going to need answer for both of you. What was it like when your dad wasn’t able to be there on some significant event, whether it was a birthday or Christmas or whatever, what was that like?

18:21
Sara Green
We grew up knowing that any celebration could take place anytime in the day or night. And if we couldn’t have Christmas until my dad got home at 1230 or 01:00 in the morning, that’s when we had Christmas. We didn’t think anything about it being different or bad or anything like that. It was just our life.

18:44
Laura Harmon
Laura I would agree with that, but I also remember in high school with sports games, you and Julie would both show up and stop by just for a couple minutes in your uniforms. So you still made the effort to come to the game.

18:59
Michael Warren
That was not an attempt to intimidate the referees. It was a lunch break.

19:04
Brent
Well, let me ask you this, Mike, just to follow up on that. You probably want to stay for the whole game. You probably want to be there on Christmas morning. We hear their perspective and they’re very understanding. How difficult was it for you? Or maybe it wasn’t difficult to not have the quote unquote normal experience.

19:26
Michael Warren
It was difficult because there are these two parts of your life that are competing against each other and they’re both incredibly important because I have my blood family who is depending on me and who’s wanted me there. But there were often times where my blue family needed me there because I was a senior officer or because I was a sergeant and they needed me. And it’s like they talk about the devil and the angel on your shoulder trying to put it was almost like I had two angels and trying to decide between them. And it’s very difficult. Very difficult.

20:07
Brent
It’s one of those things where I’m trying to wrap my head around it as just a regular civilian. And I love you and Aaron and Brandon, but if I’m not coming into work one day, I’m sorry, guys, I got stuff with my family going on, so it’s hard for me to really understand. I know it’s much more intense with your blue family. It’s almost apples and oranges kind of thing.

20:26
Michael Warren
But there was one instance when I was working with DEA, my daughter, she didn’t have a true grasp of what I was doing and the people that I was dealing with at the time. And we had made the decision. We had this one suspect in this narcotics investigation when I was assigned to DEA, that we had made the decision when he came town, when he left, were going to follow him wherever he went. And so we always had a suitcase in the back of our car. And I remember it very clearly because it was close to Halloween, which is another significant event, right. I had worked all day. I was 13 hours into my shift at this point. He starts packing up his vehicle. And so we throw together a hasty four car, two people in each car, surveillance, and we start following him, and he leaves Detroit.

21:19
Michael Warren
And so you can imagine trying to explain to my daughter, hey, I’m not going to be home tonight. Well, when are you going to be home? I really don’t know. Where are you going? Also something I don’t know. And in that particular instance right there, we followed this guy all the way to Tucson, Arizona, and we spent time out there. But I can remember the urgency. Getting back to be there for Halloween, it was just devastating, because think about that, Brent. You got the time difference. And so my kids were younger. They go to bed earlier. And so trying to be able to get time to call them and talk to them and maintain that connection and let them know they’re important to me. But I’m also following this cartel guy around, and so there’s that aspect of it as well.

22:09
Brent
Well, let me ask you this, Laura, because I think and this will go to really all of you, but you can kind of touch on it. In raising my son, I’ve always said that communication is key. I’ve told him, I said, you can ask me anything, and I’m going to give you an honest answer, whether it’s good, bad, or whatever. How important is communication between you and your dad? Are you able to talk about those things? Or did it take time to be able to do that sort of thing to where you’re able to say, okay, dad, I really need to talk about your career and how it’s affecting me.

22:41
Laura Harmon
Well, his career always fascinated me, so it’s very easy to talk to him about it, especially when I got older, I would ask him probably a million questions about everything that was going on or what he was doing all the time.

22:57
Michael Warren
Brent, think about this. And this is one I can remember this vividly. There was an investigation, a death investigation that I went on with Victor Laurie or one of our previous guests. This guy, it was in July, it was the hottest week of summer. He’s inside a vehicle, and he’s been down for at least five days. So the smell is terrible. Just think about this. If it’s the hot, what happens to your pores? Where your pores? Open up. Well, if it stinks outside, I guess what’s getting into your pores? And were around this body for a long time, and literally, I smelled like death. When I get home, I’ve got these two kids that want to hug me. How do you explain to little kid, listen, I can’t hug you because I’ve got body cooties on me right now and because I smell bad, but you can’t explain to them this decomposing body was literally you know what?

23:56
Michael Warren
I don’t I don’t know how to balance that. I still don’t know how to balance that.

24:02
Brent
Right. Well, let me ask you this, Sarah. With a father and uncles in law enforcement, was there ever a time when Mike came to you and he said, I’m going to serve in the armed forces, and then I’m going to transition into law enforcement? Was there ever a time where you said, you might want to rethink that, buddy, I’ve seen how this career is. Or were you all in on law enforcement and you were championing him?

24:27
Sara Green
No, I was behind him all the way, because to me, it might have been a different life from people around me, but it was my life, and he was a part of it. And I’m going to ask Laura something. When I was a teenager and dating, if I was going out with a boy that my father hadn’t met, if he was at work, the guy would come get me. We’d leave, and I guarantee you, within five minutes, you’d see the blue light, and he would pull him over to meet him.

25:02
Michael Warren
I did not ever do that. I can’t say there wasn’t surveillance involved, but there was no activation of emergency lights.

25:09
Sara Green
Oh, no. Pop would put that blue light on.

25:12
Michael Warren
It’s one of those things. And I have to give my mom a lot of credit. My mom had a big impact on the way that I turned out, the way that I think my mom started back to college when I started college.

25:25
Brent
Oh, wow.

25:26
Michael Warren
Why in the world would she put that kind of pressure on me? I don’t need to be comparing report cards with my mom.

25:34
Sara Green
Mike. Nobody told me I was jailbaiting.

25:38
Michael Warren
When I went off to Mikey was a little bit young going to college, but that thing right there, I’m a big believer in lifelong learning, and we’ve talked about it on the podcast a lot, and she had a lot to do with that. It’s funny generationally, how things are passed from one generation to the other. I look at my grandparents, police officer, school teacher, and then I look, now I end up being a police officer. My daughter’s a teacher. I think it’s a reminder to folks like you and I that are parents that we have tremendous impact generationally on what happens in our family.

26:18
Brent
It’s so funny. I would hear people say, my mother in law would say often that she would see her bad traits come through in her daughter. I would agree with her at times, but you’re right that you have to be cognizant of what you say, because children are always listening and they’re picking up on things, and that’s an absolute fact.

26:41
Sara Green
They don’t forget anything.

26:43
Michael Warren
No. So here’s a question for you, too, all right? Because we talked about this a couple of times on the podcast in law enforcement training. It’s a very fine line between having our people ready to handle a bad guy and getting them thinking that there’s a bad guy behind every bush. Becoming paranoid. How did you handle knowing that day after day, your loved one was going, trying to find the bad guy without becoming paranoid in your personal life?

27:15
Sara Green
I think the older I got, the more accepting I was of what my dad did.

27:20
Michael Warren
Did you ever walk down the street, though, and say, hey, that guy over there looks suspicious? Laura, I can tell by the look on your face that you’re going to have a different answer.

27:31
Laura Harmon
Yes, I did. I would always be looking.

27:34
Michael Warren
Brent, you and Laura share something in common as well.

27:38
Brent
Crime show junkie.

27:38
Michael Warren
Crime show junkie. There we go. There we go.

27:41
Brent
My reason for watching I’ve talked about this before, and it may be different from hers is I’m curious about the human condition as to what makes a person go a certain way. Are they born evil or does a certain event change them? So I’m always curious about that.

27:57
Laura Harmon
I am the same way with that.

27:59
Michael Warren
She watches it because she’s nosy, okay? And seriously, I think she started watching it because that was a way that she could fill in the know that she has this limited information about what I do, about what Julie does. And this allows for filling in the blank because we’d get mad, okay? Because even as a teenager, she would ask questions. Even if there wasn’t operational security, you had to be concerned. Know that if you got this investigation going on and now your teenage daughter is putting stuff on Twitter or on Facebook or something like that, there still is that desire to protect them as much as you possibly can from the evils of society. Do you feel like you were protected, Laura?

28:45
Laura Harmon
I do.

28:46
Michael Warren
At some point, you had to start thinking adult thoughts and start saying, hey, this isn’t playing in kindergarten. It’s not playing police. They are police, and what they’re doing is serious.

28:58
Brent
Did you have to grow up a little bit faster than maybe some other folks that you went to school with?

29:03
Laura Harmon
I think so, especially with Julie. She would be more open to talk about things where you were trying to hide things from me, not, like to keep like you were trying to keep me safe from what goes on into the world. So I think when Julie started talking about it more.

29:20
Michael Warren
You would talk about it more so for our listeners. It would have been nice to have Julie here to have that other perspective, but she’s out running a youth academy right now, a week long youth leadership academy, and they’re out today on this adventure thing, like confidence building, team building things, do zip lines and all that kind of stuff. It was easier, I think, for you to talk to her than it was for you to talk to me.

29:48
Laura Harmon
Yes, because she’s also a girl, so it was easier she understood me.

29:54
Brent
You kind of touched on this earlier, Mike, and I just wanted to expand on it. At what point because I kind of know your background and we’re similar. At what point does faith come in and you just say, I’ve got to let go and I can’t control once he leaves this house, I can’t control what happens. I just have to have the faith to say, you know what? He’ll come home safely and everything’s going to be okay.

30:18
Sara Green
Yeah, it does. It’s hard, but you do finally get to that point. But Mike was talking about this week and the influence that law enforcement officers have on this world never stops. My grandson was invited to come up and go to this week, and he wants to be a law enforcement officer, too, and a lot of it is because of his Uncle Mike.

30:46
Michael Warren
I’m struggling for the word here to try and explain it because I don’t want to say it’s stoic or fatalistic that believed that, hey, you know what? There are some things that are beyond my control. This is a dangerous job. I can control it through training hard and being prepared for it, but there’s still an element. I can’t remember which guest it was. They say, hey, the thing we often forget is the bad guy always gets a vote in what happens too.

31:12
Brent
Right.

31:13
Michael Warren
And I’ll be very blunt. I understand why my grandfather was protective of my mom because I’m the same way with my daughter, because I know that there is evil out there. And I don’t want this guy that seems like he’s nice. I don’t want to take it for granted that he’s a good guy, that it’s not some type of facade. There’s an old saying that says, if there’s to be war, let it come to me so that my children may live safe. My belief was always, hey, if somebody’s got to encounter the bad guy, let it be me and not one of my family members.

31:49
Brent
That leads into a question for you, Mike. So if you’re out on a scene and you’re seeing terrible things, obviously you’re going to see young people. You’re going to see someone, hey, that reminds me of my mother. That reminds me of my daughter. How do you disassociate that once you take the uniform off?

32:07
Michael Warren
Well, I will be very vulnerable and blunt here. I didn’t always do it very well, and there was an incident a couple of years before I retired. And I remember I was sitting in the sergeant’s office and dispatch comes out and they sent a couple of people down to an apartment complex in our city. And the call initially came out that we had two kids that drown in a swimming pool. And so I go busting down there. I was one of the first two on scene. And it turns out it wasn’t two kids. It was actually a dad and a little boy. We start myself and a firefighter and one of the ambulance folks. We started working on the kid, and we’re doing CPR on this kid, and we’re taking rounds and we’re working. I mean, literally, it had to be, I don’t know, 40, 45 minutes.

32:58
Michael Warren
We worked on them while the others are working on the dad. And they were going to try and call it there. And I said, Listen, you’re transporting this kid because this kid was about the same age as my youngest kid. This kid is not going to die on the concrete beside this swimming pool. It’s not going to happen. And so we never escort ambulances because oftentimes it creates more danger. But that one, were going to do it. We were going to close down intersections. And my car happened to be the only one that was clear. So I jumped in and I start I’m going ahead and I’m sitting my vehicle right in the middle of intersections, and I’m shutting it down. And then we get to the hospital. As I jump out, the paramedics that jump on the side of the bed start doing CPR because they’re running, they’re pushing this kid in.

33:49
Michael Warren
And when you come in the room, you go over to the left and there’s this big double room. And that’s where they take this kid and they start working on him. Well, maybe about ten minutes after we get there, dad comes in and they put him in the other part of this room. And they kept working. And the decision was made that they were going to keep working because mom was on the way. When mom got there, a nurse and a doctor came out and they explained what was going on and they said, hey, listen, we’re going to give this one more round, but if we don’t get any result, we’re going to have to call it. And they did, and they ended up having to call it. And I remember standing there with this lady, and this lady, her entire world was in that room.

34:32
Michael Warren
The only relatives she had in America because she’s originally from India were in that room, and they were both dead. They did a very good job after they called it. They cleaned everything up. And the nurse and a chaplain came out and says, ma’am, would you like to come in and say goodbye to your son? And she goes, yes. And so she comes in and so it’s me and the nurse and the chaplain. And we’re sitting there and this lady was tiny. And so she sits down this chair and they grab those warming blankets that they have where they put in there, and they wrap this kid up and they give him to her. And she sits there and she starts rubbing his face. And she goes, please come back. Let’s go play. And she’d talked to him for a couple of minutes, and then she’d look at one of us and she goes, please just try one more.

35:23
Michael Warren
And she did it to me. And I’m like, Ma’am, listen, we did everything we possibly could. Everything. And then she’d say it to the nurse, and the nurse would say the same thing. So finally, after about half an hour, the nurse says, ma’am, would you like to say goodbye to your husband? And she said, yeah, but I don’t want to leave my son alone. And so I said, well, ma’am, I said, if you trust me, I said, I’ll hold your son for you while you do that. Once everything was finally got some family friends there. But I can remember walking out in the hallway. The nurse that had been in there with me, she sees me and she starts bawling. And of course that means I’m going to start bawling. We give each other a hug. But the kid was the same age as my kid, and I didn’t realize how much it affected me until a couple of months later, we had one of our employees was injured.

36:20
Michael Warren
And so I went to the hospital, follow on the ambulance there, and that big room I talked about, that was the trauma room. And so when she came in, they went to wheel her in and I start to follow her in there and man, my heart just started pounding. Just bam, bam. And I’m like, Son of a gun. And I’m like, I couldn’t figure it out. And I’m like that’s. Why? And so when you talk about disassociating it from your family, I don’t think that you can actually do that because I’m a big believer in that. We don’t really have a business life and a personal life. We have a life and each of them have impact on the other. How do you explain that to a kid? I went home that night and my youngest is Lucas, and man, I grabbed Lucas and I’m holding tight.

37:11
Michael Warren
And how do you explain to him what is going on? I love dad, but what the heck is going on know?

37:18
Brent
Well, I think based on things that we’ve talked about with other guests, it’s probably gotten a little bit better as far as agencies offering support when officers go through that sort of thing. Let me ask you this, because I don’t know, and you may not know the answer either. What types of support do they offer family members of law enforcement who have to deal with their loved ones going through a certain situation?

37:43
Michael Warren
Start historically for a second, because when my grandpa was doing this job, it was the suck it up, buttercup, let’s go to work. At the time, I think we’ve gotten a lot better. The officers I’m not sure that everybody has gotten a lot better with the families, to be very blunt with you. I think maybe we do a good job as individual agencies with an individual officer’s family for a period of time when something bad happens. But it’s only when something really bad happens that we do that. And then there’s that fall off. Everybody life is busy, and I don’t think there’s that continued support. I do think we need to do.

38:23
Brent
A better job because you may go through a certain situation and then you may get some therapy or some support or some counseling, and you deal with that. But then months down the line, something else happens, and you know, what triggered that reminds me what happened before, and then you’re back in the thick of things. So it takes time to work through these things. And what purpose of doing this is trying to get some perspective from all those involved in a family environment. And hopefully we can provide some resources to where we can find a way that people, if they’re interested, they can find a way to get the help that’s needed that’s out there. They can talk through it, books, whatever the case may be, so they can get some understanding on how to deal with those certain circumstances.

39:05
Michael Warren
I’m going to throw this to my mom because what happens at home can have an impact on what happens at work. And Pop had that happen with him. My grandfather wasn’t ashamed. He wasn’t scared to tell people that he was an alcoholic. But he reached a point where he said, I got to make a change. How did he make that change?

39:29
Sara Green
A friend stepped up and got him involved in AA and got all of us I mean, we all went to AA. He worked. He worked and he worked. And he got to a point where he wouldn’t even take cough medicine or anything like that because he did not want to be tripped back in. But the big thing to him was the people that stepped up and walked with him through this that made the difference.

40:01
Michael Warren
That’s one of the things that Brent and I really try to advocate through this podcast right here is that if we make it okay for people to step up and say, hey, I’m struggling with this right here. You know me in music, the emotional impact. That song, He’s Not heavy, he’s my brother. That thing right, said, no, I’m going to help you carry the load. Joe Willis he does this rucksack thing, and he tries to talk about the load that is shared isn’t as heavy for either. Having someone step up like that in absence of the agency stepping up made all the difference for him.

40:39
Sara Green
It did. And it made him want to do the same thing with other people too.

40:45
Brent
You start to have a greater compassion.

40:47
Sara Green
He wanted to be the person that stepped forward and started the upholding of these people. And all his life he did. All over the country, he would go and talk to people about it. But we have to accept that we’re not all perfect and we need to be supported to help with the areas we need help in.

41:08
Michael Warren
Britt and I, we interviewed Justin Witt of the Louisville Metro Police Department, and he talked about how night after night they had to send their people out to the line during the riots and recognizing that they weren’t prepared for it and also recognizing the tremendous impact it was going to have on them. When you look back on that episode, do you kind of ask yourself now, ma’am, what did it do to those people’s family?

41:36
Brent
Right?

41:38
Michael Warren
Because they knew they were going out there night after night and standing those lines, and that could not have been healthy for them.

41:46
Brent
And that’s a thing that I’m not law enforcement. I don’t know the inner workings of it, but I think this type of thing of helping officers prepare for life outside of work at home is just as integral and important as firearms training. I know not every agency can afford to do that sort of thing, but it’s just as important. You want a well balanced officer, and if you got somebody that’s on tilt or relying on alcohol or substances, that can’t be good for your agency. So it seems smart to do it up front so we can set a foundation for them for success as they go through their career.

42:23
Michael Warren
And here’s my every episode. Mention Greg Williams. One of his favorite sayings left a Greg podcast is that, hey, you’re going to pay at some point. The question is, do you want to pay upfront in prevention costs or do you want to pay when those things go sideways, when there’s not that balance and now someone goes off the deal? Either way, as an agency, you’re going to pay, but are you going to do it willingly for the good of your people or are you going to be forced to do it because your people jack something up? And I think that’s the way we have to start looking at. And again, going back to I love Chip hugh and I’ve been a big know, seeing people as people, not as objects, changes the way that we deal with people. But too often that is focused on dealing with people externally.

43:08
Michael Warren
We need to do a better job of doing that internally. And I would propose to you, based upon this conversation and the conversation last week, that also has to extend to the family of the first responder in order to have its full effect.

43:22
Brent
And I think it’s rightfully so, that we thank those first responders, those in law enforcement and the armed forces. We thank them for their service. But sometimes, often is lost is their family standing right beside them. And we’re silent when we give out those compliments where they’re in that battle right along with them. They may not be on the front lines, may not be wearing the uniform, but they are feeling the pain and the struggle and the anxiety. They have that same sort of thing. And so we need to extend that. Thanks to them for going on that.

43:56
Michael Warren
Battle with you, mom, as we’re wrapping things up here. If you could have gone back in a time machine and you could have changed it, would you have changed? If you could Pop’s career or my career?

44:12
Sara Green
No way.

44:14
Michael Warren
Would you have changed the impact that it had on Pop or I?

44:19
Sara Green
No, I would hope that I would be more support for you in the job that you do, because y’all have to understand, you really do give a gift to the community.

44:31
Michael Warren
We’ve actually had people on here that have described it as a mission field, and I love that analogy. The community is the mission field. Laura, would you change it?

44:40
Laura Harmon
No.

44:41
Michael Warren
What would you do differently if you could change it? If you had that power, what would you do?

44:46
Laura Harmon
I think I would change the communication a little more, but it’s thinking about how technology is now than how it was when I was younger. It’s easier to communicate now than it was when I was younger.

45:00
Michael Warren
Britt, I’m so old. I’m so old, okay, that I used to carry a roll of quarters in my bag so that if I wanted to call home, I could find a payphone and I could go and do that. Right. I can remember my first cell phone. Okay. This thing was terrible.

45:20
Brent
A bridge.

45:21
Michael Warren
And guess how many minutes I got per month? Probably like 30, 25, to be exact. And so it’s like I get 1 minute per shift when I call. Don’t answer the first time I call, okay. And I’m going to hang up before the answer machine answers because that charges you a. So when I call Michael and Laura, you’d be ready. I’m going to tell you good night and I love you. Hey, how you guys doing? How was school today? Okay. It was really good. Okay. I love you guys. Make sure you go to bed. And that’s the way it worked. And technology has made it easier for the good. But on the flip side of that, though, it’s made it worse for our law enforcement families because now our first responders are tied to that device and work can get a hold of them. So everything has a cost.

46:04
Brent
And I will say this to Laura, I know as and I’m not going to ask age. I know that I don’t ask females ages, but I will say this. As I’ve gotten older, I remember looking back at adults in my life who were hard on me and they really pushed me to certain things. And I was not necessarily angry, but I’m kind of resentful. But as I’ve gotten older, with hindsight, I see the reasoning behind it and I’m much more softer when I look towards them and I think they were setting me up for success. I just didn’t realize it at the time. So I would hope that you would look at his sacrifice in the line of duty as a way to set you up for success in your life.

46:46
Michael Warren
Brent I can agree in part with what you said, because looking back, my sister deserved everything that she freaking got from my parents. I, on the other hand, was a pleasure and it was unwarranted. I’m just going to say that.

47:03
Sara Green
Yes, but we talk about all the things that we have today, the communications that we have and all, but back when, and it was before you were along, my little brother was at home alone with my mother one time and she had aneurysm and had a stroke. He did the only thing he knew what to do. He called the patrol station. My mommy is six in my daddy home now. And that saved her life and it.

47:33
Michael Warren
Saved us, too, because when one of ours calls, everybody’s going. Everybody’s going.

47:39
Brent
I think what the important thing we’ll do for this particular episode is I’m going to try to find some resources to put in there in case some folks are listening and they’re thinking, you know what? Maybe I’m not the best father, husband, daughter, mother. And I’m taking my family for granted and neglecting them. And I need to find a better work life balance. We’ll refer you back to Catherine Boyd’s website and she can put you in contacts with some people. She can work with you. We’ll find some other resources we can put in the show notes, because I think it’s important when people listen these episodes, hopefully the takeaway is, how can we get better? Sure, we bring up the topic, we talk about it, but we just don’t want to end there. We want to have that application and moving forward.

48:22
Michael Warren
Looking back at my grandpa, he recognized he needed to better. He made the effort to do so. And for anybody who’s listening, hey, listen, you probably could better. Don’t be satisfied with what you are now. Understand it’s going to take work, but it’s worth that is worth doing. And if you’re willing to lay your life down on the line for the community, then you should be willing to live your life for your family appropriately.

48:51
Brent
Yeah, absolutely. And I think the appropriate way to end this episode is by me saying to both Sarah and Laura thank you for being the daughter, the mother of those in law enforcement. Thank you for your service. You’re the ones that were there at home waiting for them to arrive home safely. So sometimes, as we said earlier, your contributions don’t get recognized as much as others. So thank you guys for enduring the same things that they have to go through on an emotional level. And thank you for being a part of this episode to give us some insight, at least for me, to learn a little bit more about the guy.

49:28
Michael Warren
We know as Mike Warren.

49:30
Brent
I was hoping for some more, like, Jerry Springer type stuff, but this was really good therapeutic. So thank you ladies so much for joining us today. It was a pleasure to get to know you.

49:38
Sara Green
Thank you all.

49:38
Laura Harmon
Thank you.